Conversations with Nana

Many of us on occasion slip into a blaming mode and comfort ourselves by nursing our wounds through blaming another. However, the person who consistently practices spewing their negative emotions and who feels entitled to do so, will probably need outside help to begin to unravel what is, in essence, a lifestyle. Transferring one’s own pain to someone else can do terrible damage to a relationship. We justify ourselves by saying that we are, after all, expressing our feelings. And we feel vindicated because we often feel better temporarily once a target is found. Feeling better after a rampage reinforces that the blame is well placed.  But, when we begin to see connecting links, such as lack of nutrition or sleep, or feelings of defeat, for example, we can begin to let go of the idea that the problem is with the other person. The person on the receiving end may be an innocent bystander, or, that person may have helped create an event, perhaps a troublesome one which needs to be addressed, but, in both cases, the problem of blame and hostility lies within.

Paradoxically, blaming stems from a feeling of fear. The blaming person feels afraid of being seen as wrong for having anger or rage and quickly tries to change the focus of attention. Blaming may be for as simple a reason as not knowing any other way to approach the problem. Or, we may tell ourselves that we feel relieved to have gotten things off our chest and, after all, we are entitled to express emotions any way they come out. When you blame, accuse, attack, and generally expect the other person to do something to fix your feelings, you have created an emotional dumping ground. You may end up with the appearance of innocence, but your disguise is at the other person’s expense.

In talking about your negative feelings through a compassionate filter, with the intention of remaining kind and open, you can feel free to include how you would like to see things change or evolve. If you feel resentment, anger, or a desire to blame, which would be understandable in many cases, those feelings can be expressed in the same direct way, with full ownership. The difference in the direct method is that you are no longer accusing or blaming the other person, but acknowledging your feelings of blame. Instead of, “You are the reason we’re in this mess,” the statement might become, “I’m so angry I can’t help but feel like blaming you for everything.” Then, anger or hurt correctly become the issue, and not outside events.

Sometimes we know what we are feeling, and believe it’s OK to hold onto the feelings, but we can’t bring ourselves to state them directly. We drop clues and hints and hope the other person gets the point without having to spell it out. Or we try to act out our feelings with sighs, shrugs, frowns, lack of eye contact, and avoidance of physical nearness. We fear that to verbalize what’s on our minds is a kind of attack, which it may be if enough resentment exists. So, we hint, use sarcasm, pout, turn away, glare, or cultivate a stinging “NOTHING!” when asked what is going on.

When you use, “I’d rather not talk about it!” without a legitimate personal need for privacy, you really mean to punish and show up the other person for not being able intuitively to know your mind. It is as if you are asking others to find you through a maze that they are unaware exists. Many times we are not thinking deviously. We really believe or fear that we won’t get our needs met even if we say what we are feeling in a straightforward way. Many people operate under the misconception that if they state a need or feeling directly, they should have that need met. Even if the other person truly cannot address the feeling or fulfill the need, the speaker sees anything less as outright rejection. So rather than feel the pain of rejection, the person expresses his or her feelings in haphazard ways. If the listener gets the point, the indirect tactic worked. If they don’t, pride is still intact. The disadvantage is that often the other person misses the point, or simply doesn’t know what to do other than follow the spoken directive.

Here is a challenge:  Ask trusted friends to tell you what their assessment is of what you are feeling. Most likely, even if you have told yourself not to dwell on minor annoyances, you will find that people can usually tell what is going on with another person. If you have been leaking out your feelings through silent body language, you may be tempted to think how lucky you are that, indeed, people do get your point without your having to say it. If so, be sure to ask your friends for an honest evaluation of how they feel about your indirect communication and if they would like anything to change. If you have friends who can honestly say they accept you just the way you are, great, your communication is not a problem. But be sure, while they are telling you everything is just fine, to check inward and see if you really believe them.

If you are a person who has learned that indirect body language, silence, or cryptic remarks feel easiest and often work best, it may be difficult to want to try new ways. The first step is to really understand that this behavior is counter-productive to a consistently caring and peaceful relationship. Once you get of taste of how it feels to be treated with a ‘cold shoulder’ or a silent expectation, you begin to realize that by foisting this behavior on others you are not loving them.

Part of caring for another is to want their wellbeing. There is a simple, although perhaps not so easy at first, technique that helps in opening up and sharing feelings honestly. The first part takes place during a time of peace. Explain to the person that you seem to get tongue-tied right at that moment when you recognize that talking would be helpful. Explain that you are trying to change this indirect behavior, however it is difficult and may take a lot of trial and error on your part, and a lot of patience from both of you. Finally, explain that you will try to respond when asked about being upset, but that if you put off the other person, it’s not intentional. Ask him or her to please understand that you are in the trial and error part of learning this new skill.

The second part of this exercise happens during the interpersonal difficulty. Start by simply saying something in the moment that conveys your current feelings. For example, you might say, “Yes, I’m upset, but I’m not ready to talk about it.” Once you are able at least minimally to state your position, (this is a very big step,) and once the other person recognizes your statement as part of the previous agreement you both made, you both can relax and temporarily move apart or move on to other issues.

The last part of this skill happens later, after the flames have died down. This is the fulfillment of your firm commitment to yourself and your relationship. You will indeed get back to the other person and talk about the feelings you couldn’t talk about previously. The first few times will be scary, threatening, and leave you feeling very vulnerable. The other person in this scenario hopefully will be receptive, warm, and even grateful to see that you are moving closer rather than maintaining icy distance. But there is also a chance that the person will need some practice and may experience a trial and error process in trying to catch up.

Unfortunately, there are no guarantees. However, the above process is intimacy at it’s fullest. Building intimacy in a relationship is not about eliminating problems; intimacy is about learning together your unique style of successfully handling the problems that inevitably come along.

In needing to express your inner life to another, the focus is one of viability. The results of healthy communication are mutual satisfaction, where both parties feel successfully represented, efficacy or efficiency, the ability to produce one’s intended meaning and be understood correctly, and expanded awareness of both positions.

The direct method of expressing feelings is to acknowledge that you are having an emotional reaction and, rather than blaming someone else for causing the emotion, understand that you are responsible for your interpretation and the way your mind processes the information. The goal is not to avoid or deny hurt or anger, pretending or hoping to be saintly and above getting your feelings hurt, but to understand that these feeling are a part of you and will be triggered on occasion, and that’s OK. The goal is to treat yourself and others with acceptance of everyone’s humanity even while not agreeing with the results.

Sounds noble, but in many cases, it takes dedicated practice, patience, and trust. You are far along the way, once your intention in talking to the other person is always to be clear, kind, understood, and to find a resolution to the situation at hand. With this intention, which is one of compassion, there can be plenty of room for mistakes and unexpected backsliding because both parties recognize the true goal is reconciliation.

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There are several factors to consider when determining if now is an appropriate time to move the conversation to a deeper level. Some people won’t need to hear your feelings in order to better understand what you are saying. In business encounters, for example, emotional sharing is usually not appropriate. Even if you feel you need to share, there won’t be much of a point to it if the other person is not receptive to hearing. Secondly, safety is important. Sharing emotions can leave one feeling vulnerable and exposed. If you sense you are in a hostile environment and what you say may be used against you, it doesn’t make sense to proceed anyway. Thirdly, your own level of confidence comes into play. While you need not be completely self-assured, you need to know that you can take care of yourself if your sharing does not go over well. Finally, you will want to assess your motivation in telling your deeper feelings. Important reasons to share emotions include a sense of needing to bring your feelings into the light, a desire to let others know, a yearning to open up, and a wish to further intimacy. Dangerous reasons include a desire to use feelings as a manipulative tool. Or, you may be hoping that in hearing your feelings someone will rescue you or make you feel better, saving you from doing your own hard work. Of course, telling how we feel and having someone respond with kindness often does make us feel better. The danger lies in holding expectations about how others are supposed to respond.

Some things to consider, when jumping into an emotionally based conversation: Does the listener need or want to hear deeper feelings in order to further understand? Does it feel safe enough for you to put yourself in a vulnerable position? Do you presently feel strong enough to take care of yourself if the conversation doesn’t go well? A ‘no’ answer to any of these questions does not necessarily mean you cannot express your inner self, but it may mean you need to consider time and place, and have several contingency strategies ready, such as “if this happens, then I will respond this way…” Reason within yourself, “What are the possible results if I express myself directly?” and then imagine all the ways you will handle the worst and not-so-bad contingencies.

Furthermore, what are your reasons for sharing your feelings? Are you doing so because you want to or only because you think you should? Doing anything only because we think we ‘should,’ may invite additional problems because we are merely obeying some outside mandate and not fully committed to the plan. Perhaps you hear yourself finding good reasons not to want to directly express your feelings, such as knowing the other person will be hurt, or that you are using your emotions as a manipulative weapon. Listen to all your reasons for remaining silent at any given time and treat them as respectfully as you would if they were coming from a beloved friend. There will be times when the wisest course may be to remain silent. The key here is not so much that you decide, consciously, to withhold a statement of feeling, but that you are clear with yourself as to your motives in both sharing and withholding. Once you see that withholding by inner force can mean a build up of resentment, the issue no longer becomes one of telling or not telling, but rather one of timing.

Once we understand what feelings are, the next step is to understand how they work. Sometimes we don’t recognize our feelings at all even though most people would agree that feelings are inevitable given the particular situation. We tend to say, “Oh that? That doesn’t bother me.” or “To be honest, I don’t know how I feel.” Sometimes this inability to get in touch with any feelings about a situation comes in times of trouble or tragedy and means that we have successfully blocked something too painful to face. The advantage is that we have created a protective zone. The disadvantage is that as long as the protective zone exists, we are insulated from all feelings, so that joy and happiness make little headway, too. On a short-term basis, insulating numbness works very well, such as in protecting us from the initial shock of grief. In the long-term, however, excessive insulation creates real problems. When we allow ourselves to remain unaware of our emotional reactions, we eventually become numb to all but the most superficial emotions.

One safe way to begin getting in touch with rigid insulation is to practice giving yourself small things that you know you want. For example, read books or watch movies that are enjoyable and then stop reading or watching as soon as you no longer feel interested. What you will be saying to yourself is that your feelings really do count. Even though the exercise may seem insignificant and meaningless, soon enough the feeling part of your life will begin to recognize that it can get what it wants and needs. You will be cooperating with yourself. Gradually, more and more requests and feelings will surface. Your job at that point is to understand that acknowledging your feelings doesn’t necessarily mean you must change anything, but that you may make changes if you want. Another way to begin to get in touch with feelings is to ask others whom you trust to tell you how they think most people would feel in circumstances similar to yours. If you suspect that you are out of touch, start with an inner conversation in which you say, “Here is an example of where I believe feelings are appropriate and yet I’m not experiencing them. I wonder what it would be like for me to feel….” Imagine how someone with those feelings would react. As ideas about come to mind, your feelings eventually will begin to surface.

In another way of dealing with feelings, we know we have them and we know what they entail, however, we don’t allow ourselves to experience them. We tell ourselves, “This is petty. I shouldn’t let this bother me,” or “I’m bigger than this. I’m not going to let this get me down.” We don’t want to appear picky, or cause hurt over small matters — a noble idea when it works and a disaster when it doesn’t. Anger and resentment can build up. When something troubling is significant enough to linger in your mind, it is dishonest to treat it as if it is unimportant. If the issue were truly insignificant, you would not have felt annoyance or hurt in the first place. On the other hand, refusing to dwell on feelings that appear either trivial or unfounded is another way of saying that you are trying to let go of the problem. To truly let go means that if a similar situation occurs again, you will react as if it is the first time, with no left over hidden resentments. Usually, the only way you can learn if letting go is possible is through trial and error. The first few times you tell yourself, “Don’t sweat the small stuff. This is nothing,” you may truly believe that you are finished, only later to see anger bubbling up when you least expect it. After a few times of observing when letting go works and when it doesn’t, you will be able to tell when refusing to dwell on negative feelings is a genuine aid and when it’s ineffective.

If you are a person who feels unable to express your feelings, be assured that with dedicated practice a healthy expression of feelings is a skill that everyone can learn.

A sweet couple I once knew told me about how well they got along. “Every morning when we wake up we tell each other about the dreams we had during the night. And what our plans are for that day. And evenings we tell each other how our day went. We really communicate.” Later, when they were breaking up, each blamed communication – the lack of – for the problem. They discovered that it is easy to share joyful thoughts with another person, but they had no skills in sharing negative feelings. They passed the what-I-like-about-you test, but failed the more crucial one: “What troubles me about you…” While sharing private thoughts may be difficult at times, sharing negative feelings is often the hardest thing to do.

First of all, many people confuse attitudes and opinions with feelings. The language of feelings involves short words, such as ‘happy, sad, excited, angry, or afraid.’ Expressions of feelings come out in very short sentences, and they start with “I,” as in “I am upset,” not with “you,” as in “you are a jerk.” When you hear yourself go beyond “I am sad, angry, etc.” and move into longer sentences that involve explaining, you can correctly assume that you have moved out of emotions and into an analytical or intellectual mode. Explanations are valid, of course, but when they come too fast, attached to what was meant to be a moment of self-revelation, they become a distraction. We switch to a rationalizing mode as a way to protect those tender, vulnerable, hurting feelings, to avoid feeling even more pain by talking about them.

Attitudes and thoughts are often disguised as feelings, as in, “that person is boring, that’s just the way I feel about it.” Sometimes an attitude or opinion posing as a feeling comes across sounding like an accusation, as if something outside of us is responsible for how we end up feeling. Instead of saying, “I feel rejected, or lonely, or bored,” we avoid talking about ourselves altogether and just dwell on trying to change the people or things around us. We say, “You’re nuts,” when what we mean is, “I’m angry.” “You are rude,” becomes shorthand for “I’m insulted or hurt.” When others respond as if they have been attacked, which is how people often feel after being told something is wrong with them, we can conveniently reply, “Why are you so angry? I’m just telling you how I feel.”

Talking about the other person or citing an outside cause is valid if clearly labeled as personal opinion, such as, “I know you enjoy that kind of movie, but, personally, I find it boring.” But even with such careful attention, the other person may receive your comment as an attack: Clearly, he or she does not have any taste or intelligence when it comes to art. Of course you have a right to your opinion, and there is nothing wrong with sharing your thoughts on any subject. The issue is not about those rights, it’s about sorting out the confusion that comes when opinions are used as a mask for unexpressed feelings. Opinions are nothing more than a false front when used to cover up deeper feelings. Consider the comment made by a spouse, “You watch too much TV.” The watcher might retort, “It’s my business how much TV I watch,” causing a standoff if not a full argument. A more personal comment by the spouse might have been, “I feel lonely and neglected,” providing a better opportunity for some positive response to occur. Perhaps the most important distinction between feelings and opinions is the shift from heart to head. Offering opinions, when you know there are deeper feelings that need to be said, is avoidance. Opinions, ideas, and thoughts are necessary in good communication, especially to plan a new course of action. But knowing the difference is important in getting the whole picture.

This is precisely where personal statements, such as, “I am hurt,” can be practiced and blaming statements such as, “You are my problem,” need to be avoided. It takes practice and concentration to keep wounded or angry feelings from turning mean or hurtful. The process of making short, personal statements about feelings may seem awkward at first, but if you remind yourself and the other person that this is a temporary solution to help you learn to relax and eliminate blame from your vocabulary, the awkwardness will seem no worse than the studied, sometimes clumsy way we approach learning any new skill.

As our brains are developing in youth, we are secretly weaving stories to ourselves about why the world is working the way it is. In forming the stories, we pick from essentially archetypal scenarios about the hero’s journey. The hero has a quest or mission to fulfill, something or someone must be saved or stopped, something is missing that must be found, or something is causing interference that must be removed, some hardship must be overcome or peace must somehow be established. These stories become integral to what’s called our world view, and the view of the world is that it is either against us or supporting us along the way and we are either doomed or we prevail.

The interesting thing about our stories, and what makes them archetypal, is that they can go either way in interpretation. The princess is being pursued by an evil lord, which either makes her a victim or someone powerfully attractive. The destitute man is either pathetically begging or offering you an opportunity to do a good deed. Thus two friends can see the same incident or experience with entirely different slants, so that one or the other may be shaking his or head and thinking, “How can you be so blind?”

The interpretations are deeply personal and consistent. While the world looks benevolent and creative and also malicious and destructive, one’s worldview typically takes one direction over the other and then builds from there. Once a person has developed his or her worldview it becomes easier for that person to move from interpretation to creation in keeping the momentum going. If you think the world is going your way, you are better motivated to seek out positive looking experiences, for example, on the basis that life always works out for the best anyway. On the other hand, if the world is against you, there would be little hope to keep trying and continually see how bad things really are. After a time, the worldview becomes a part of a person’s identity to the point that it must be protected as a vital part of the person. For example, a potentially positive experience, one that would seriously challenge a negative person’s stance, must be sabotaged if it cannot be avoided. Thus, we sometimes meet former friends of someone who are shaken in bewilderment, wondering how their good intentions toward another could have gone so awry.

After a history of rejection in one’s early years, for example, years of experience of being shot down, ideas about abandonment become entrenched, as familiar as one’s own image in the mirror. Good experiences never feel completely true because they are a contradiction of what is held as the truth. Any attempt to change someone’s worldview from the outside is only a drop in the already poisoned bucket. The hero’s journey, in such a case, becomes the quest to change from the inside. Courage must be mustered to deconstruct, tear down, essentially, the old identity to build a new and better one, and faith must be bolstered to believe the new way is actually better and even possible. Patience must be nurtured because there will be many setbacks over time until the new ideas are established. Most importantly, while the changes are necessarily internal, the hero’s journey is best not a solitary one. A worldview is changed through experiences in the world with trusted others offering more realistic interpretations to counter the person’s old rigid view.